No brain or logic to any of it and the noisy action isn't enough to cover the problems

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2005)

Lincoln Six Echo is one of many people who survived the contamination of the outside world and now live in an enclosed complex where everything from their diet down to their daily clothing to managed for them. They live and peaceful but controlled life with their only ambition being to win the regular lottery and be taken away to the Island  the last place on earth that is outside and free of contamination. However Lincoln begins to question the logic of the whole thing when he finds a bug that has "survived". His suspicions lead to discoveries about the truth behind the complex and his very existence and sees him and Jordan Two Delta fleeing the complex with a small army on their trail.
The issue of cloning and such is a timely focus for The Island given the debate over stem cell research etc at the moment, so this film would have benefited from producing food for thought as a side-order to lots of action. However when you have Michael Bay as your director it is unlikely that he is going to be able to pull that off and indeed this film pretty much fails to do anything with the cloning issue of any value other than using it to remake Logan's Run and make lots of stuff go bang and fall down. This means that the majority of the film is just used to set up the next chase scene and we are not allowed to think (or indeed given any encouragement to do so) while the script ignores any moral complexity in the issue and just makes this about two people running away from a well-funded conspiracy  the reasons don't really matter after a while. This is a real shame because it could have been so much more interesting and so much more challenging but instead it just treads the genre line and soon the narrative has lost all impact and you find yourself wishing the next thing would just hurry up and explode. Bay may not have written the film but he is just as much to blame for this as the writers; you do get the feeling that he thinks everything by be solving by having a helicopter shot sweep around his characters on a mountain top.
Which is not a bad thing in itself because the film does produce one or two enjoyable action sequences but you do have to ask yourself if it is worth 130 minutes for "one or two" impressive special effects? I would say no because, although they do look impressive, they do lack genuine tension, mainly because we have no real concern or interest in the characters or their story. So yeah, things fall down in very expensive ways and if that is all you want then welcome aboard but personally I just got tired of the hollow noise I was watching. The cast don't do anything to help either, nor could they be expected to without any material to work with. McGregor appears to have forgotten how to act after three Star Wars movies spent in front of a blue screen  he is boring here and about as far from being an action star as he is from being the impressive young Scottish actor he was when I first saw him. Johansson is sexy and currently hot property but this will not allow her to produce many more films like this where she just sleep walks her way through a performance that could have been delivered by any blonde starlet. Bean is a good baddie but I'm sure he could have done more had the material been there to use his character as a source of moral complexity, but we'll never know. Likewise Hounsou is OK but the material is just not there to make him interesting or a threat. Buscemi is always a welcome addition but you do have to wonder why Duncan bothered.
Overall a noisy hollow action movie whose one or two thrills might be enough to satisfy some genre fans but not the majority. The script could have been an enjoyable mix of action thrills and moral complexity but it feels like it was generated by a computer and it fails to engage on any level  even failing to inject tension and pace into the action or the narrative. Could have been more but is really just a ho-hum action movie that has nothing really to recommend it for or make it stand out in a sea of much better action blockbusters.